I remember (from listening to a bunch of podcasts by German hackers from the mid 00s) a strong vibe that the security of software systems at the time and earlier was definitely worse than what would've been optimal for the people making the software (definitely not safe enough for the users!).
I wonder whether that is (1) true and (if yes) (2) what led to this happening!
Maybe companies were just myopic when writing software then, and could've predicted the security problems but didn't care?
Another reason might be that lower-level software usually can make any security issues a reputational externality for end-user software: sure, in the end Intel's branch predictor is responsible for Meltdown and Spectre, and for setting cache timeouts too low that we can nicely Rowhammer it out, but what end-user will blame Intel and not "and then Chrome crashed and they wanted my money".
This is, of course, in the context of the development of AI, and the common argument that "companies will care about single-single alignment".
The possible counterexample of software security engineering until the mid 00s seemed like a counterexample to me, but on reflection I'm now not so sure anymore.